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Chaos. Inconsistencies. Shift and changes. Considerable threats.
These are some of the phrases that Chief Business Officers and procurement professionals used to describe the current landscape in the latest National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) State of Higher Education survey.
Managing unreliable funding sources and meeting higher operational costs continue to be two of the biggest challenges. As one survey respondent put it: “Change is coming faster than anyone is ready for; what worked yesterday does not potentially work today.”
So, funding is being squeezed at the same time things are getting more expensive. Since colleges and universities often spend more than half of their operating budgets on goods and services, even modest price increases can hit budgets hard. The Higher Education Price Index from the Commonfund Institute showed a 3.6% increase in operating costs in fiscal 2025 — a full percentage point higher than the inflation rates for consumers.
In this environment, every dollar matters.
Procurement teams and finance offices are under intense pressure to manage budgets more efficiently and reduce costs wherever possible. That sounds great on paper, but the challenge for more colleges and universities is that spend visibility isn’t always transparent. Procurement data is often scattered across enterprise systems, purchasing card programs, AP platforms, supplier contracts, and departmental budgets. Purchasing decisions may occur in dozens or even hundreds of locations across campus. As a result, opportunities to improve contract utilization, spend under management, and control spending can remain hidden.
Spend visibility is the ability to understand spending activity across the institution. It provides procurement leaders with a clear picture of who is buying, what is being purchased, which suppliers are being used, and how spending aligns with institutional procurement strategies.
“Greater visibility into procurement transactions enables higher education institutions to align spending across departments, faculty, administrators, and executive teams.” — Brad Micciche in University Business
Without visibility, procurement becomes reactive. With visibility, procurement becomes strategic.
Most colleges and universities operate within highly decentralized purchasing environments.
Academic departments, research programs, facilities teams, athletics departments, and administrative units often make purchasing decisions independently. While this flexibility supports institutional operations, it can make it difficult to understand spending at an enterprise level. The challenge is bringing those pieces together into a complete picture of institutional spending.
When spending is difficult to track, savings opportunities become difficult to identify. You might not know that two departments are buying the exact same item but paying different prices. Fragmented systems may not flag off-contract spend that could reduce costs by purchasing from approved vendors and contract rates…until a deal’s already been finalized.
Fragmentation invites tail spend and maverick spending. While decentralized spending may be necessary, it makes procurement spend analytics harder and misses significant opportunities to lower costs and reduce administrative overhead.
Limited visibility may also contribute to:
While enterprise-level software contracts or construction projects undergo rigorous vetting, thousands of dollars quietly get spent through departmental P-cards. For example, a biology professor buying specialized lab supplies, an athletics coach ordering last-minute team gear, or an administrative assistant buying toner on Amazon rather than an approved contract vendor — these transactions are often buried as generic line items in your AP system.
On their own, a $200 purchase may not seem like a big deal. But aggregated across hundreds of cardholders over a fiscal year, this unmanaged “tail spend” represents tens of thousands of dollars in missed volume discounts. Without more comprehensive spend visibility, procurement teams can’t see these micro-transactions until the budget cycle is already over, when it’s too late to make a difference.
Spend visibility begins with data quality. Even the most sophisticated reporting tools and spend analytics platforms cannot provide meaningful insights if the underlying data is inconsistent, incomplete, or inaccurate. This is why spend data management serves as the foundation for uncovering hidden savings.
Even if highly efficient institutions, procurement data is often messy. It’s not from a lack of data, but that data is not always organized in a way that supports meaningful spend analysis. For example, a single supplier may appear in multiple ways over time. Purchases may be categorized differently by individual departments. Contract information may be incomplete or simply unaligned in AP systems.
For example, a supplier could appear in institutional records as:
In a spend analysis, these may appear to be three separate suppliers and underestimate total spend attributed to a supplier. Now, multiply this issue across thousands of transactions and hundreds of suppliers, and it becomes easy to understand why many institutions struggle with spend visibility.
Improving spend visibility requires improving the quality and consistency of procurement data.
Effective spend data management typically includes:
Yet, more than half of procurement leaders surveyed said cross-system integration and insufficient data quality are significant issues. This lack of integration makes spend opportunity assessments difficult, and procurement spend analytics are less meaningful if you can’t see the entire picture.
In higher education, achieving spend visibility is a cultural challenge as much as a technical one. Academic departments tend to fiercely guard their autonomy, often viewing centralized procurement mandates as bureaucratic red tape that slows down research or teaching.
Therefore, the goal of gainful spend visibility isn’t to strip departments of their flexibility, but to empower them with better choices. When finance leaders use data to show a dean exactly how much money their department can save by shifting to a negotiated contract or cooperative agreement, you can make compliance more collaborative. Strategic spend visibility reframes procurement teams from being watchdogs to valuable partners for individual departments.
Consider a research department that purchases laboratory supplies independently because speed is critical to grant-funded projects. Procurement’s goal is not to prevent those purchases. Instead, spend visibility helps identify whether those purchases are being made through approved contracts, whether similar items are being purchased elsewhere on campus at lower prices, and whether supplier consolidation could reduce costs without disrupting research activities.
Improved spend visibility can also help:
Procurement Improvement | Direct Financial Impact | Operational Impact |
Supplier consolidation | Lower pricing and reduced supplier costs | Fewer supplier relationships to manage |
Increased contract utilization | Better negotiated pricing | Improved compliance |
Reduced tail spend/Maverick spend | Greater spend leverage | Better reporting accuracy |
Improved spend data quality | More accurate budgeting | Faster decision-making |
Increased spend under management | Stronger purchasing control | Greater procurement visibility |
With greater spend visibility, you can also find ways to streamline your procurement process, reducing the administrative burden.
Conducting a comprehensive spend analysis requires time, expertise, and resources that many procurement teams simply do not have. Contracting with third-party spend analysis services can be expensive and time-consuming.
However, E&I Cooperative Services offers a no-cost Strategic Spend Assessment (SSA) for members. SSAs use your institutional spend data to identify hidden opportunities for savings and procurement improvement. A Strategic Spend Assessment is a structured process in which we review and analyze your spend data for opportunities to:
As the only nonprofit, member-owned sourcing cooperative that solely serves the education sector, E&I had deep expertise in higher education procurement. Some team members come directly from working in higher education procurement leadership positions and have extensive experience. A dedicated Sourcing Consultant and Strategic Sourcing Analyst will conduct a confidential evaluation of your high-level spend data. Typically, this comprises 12-month spend data that is readily accessible in your Accounts Payable and P-Card systems.
With this data, E&I will look for strategic opportunities in several key areas:
The first step will be establishing of your existing spend with E&I. We typically look back at the previous three years to create a baseline.
Next, we look at your exiting commodity spend and look for opportunities to bring more spend under management. We’ll also take a look a contracts you have with current suppliers to compare that to the strength of cooperative contracts with E&I to look for savings opportuniti9es.
During our spend analysis services, we often find significant supplier sprawl. It’s not unusual to find academic institutions managing more suppliers than necessary, missing opportunities to leverage scale e and negotiate better contracts, and reduce administrative overhead. We’ll identify potential areas where you can reduce your supplier base and redirect spend.
E&I Cooperative Services offers patronage refunds based on participation. We’ll make sure you aren’t under-reporting your spend volume and missing revenue opportunities.
Your spend analytics team will also identify future alignment opportunities for cost savings and supplier consolidation through E&I, using both our existing contracts and upcoming RFPs. This can help you plan for future spending decisions.
Once an E&I Strategic Spend Assessment uncovers opportunities, you need to act on the data to make meaningful change. As a first step, you can identify the low-hanging fruit to find quick wins. For example, opting for a cooperative contract often produces immediate savings, helping validate the process and build momentum. Then, evaluating the impact of consolidating suppliers and bringing more spend under management can extend your savings.
We’re here every step of the way in your journey. E&I offers more than 265 cooperative agreements with top-tier suppliers. Each contract is competitively solicited, aggregating the demand of more than 6,500 academic institutions to achieve significant volume discounts and preferred terms for E&I members.
FAQs
What is spend visibility in procurement?
With spend visibility, you can look at spending across suppliers, categories, departments, and contracts. It helps institutions identify opportunities, understand how money is being spent, and look for ways to improve procurement practices.
What is the difference between spend analysis and spend analytics?
Spend analysis focuses on organizing and evaluating historical spending data to identify patterns and opportunities. Spend analytics expands on that information by providing broader insights that support forecasting, planning, and strategic decision-making.
What is spend under management?
Spend under management refers to spending that is with approved vendors and contractual agreements, helping you optimize discounts and comply with institutional policies.
How does supplier consolidation reduce costs?
Supplier consolidation can reduce administrative workload, improve your purchasing leverage, simplify supplier management, and increase contract utilization.
What is included in E&I’s Strategic Spend Assessment?
E&I’s Strategic Spend Assessment analyzes institutional spend data to identify supplier consolidation opportunities, contract utilization gaps, sourcing opportunities, spend under management improvements, and procurement efficiencies.
To learn more about E&I’s Strategic Spend Assessment, connect with an E&I representative today.